BACHELARD, Gaston [Surname pronounced (roughly): bash-lar] (1884-1962)
A minor French bourgeois philosopher of the Continental
school who wrote on various topics including the philosophy of science (where he especially
emphasized the role of psychology in scientific theorizing), psychoanalysis, dreams and poetry.
He is best known for introducing the concepts of an “epistemological obstacle” (obstacle
épistémologique) and “epistemological break” (rupture
épistémologique) into French philosophy, though the second term was later
popularized much more by Louis Althusser. According to
Bachelard progress in science is frequently temporarily blocked by some conceptual “obstacle”,
and then is resumed when a “rupture” breaking through that obstacle occurs. (This appears to
be a rather trivial insight! Thomas Kuhn’s theory of
paradigm shifts in science, which descends from
Bachelard’s views, likewise greatly exaggerates the importance of this general idea.)
Bachelard was celebrated by the French
establishment and was awarded some of the most prestigious positions in the Académie
française. He also influenced a number of later French philosophers (some of whom
are commonly supposed to have also been influenced by Marxism), such as
Michel Foucault, Louis
Althusser, Dominique Lecourt and Jacques Derrida.

“The brilliance of Bacon’s reputation has hardly diminished, even to
this day. Though not a creative scientist himself, he is nevertheless considered one of
the crucial figures in the scientific revolution, whose writings made possible the growth
and expansion of science. Bacon provided a brilliant defense of the experimental method,
which had been viewed as suspect during the centuries in which Scholastic dispute and
reliance on ancient authority were considered the proper path to true knowledge. He
provided a road map for the development of experimental science, advocating for the
systematic collection of data by a multitude of field-workers, and its concentration in
a centralized institution for systematic evaluation. More than anything, perhaps, he made
the experimental method respectable.” —Amir Alexander, Infinitesimal (2014),
p. 254.

BADIOU, Alain (1937- )
A very confused and grossly overrated French petty-bourgeois political radical and
idealist (non-materialist) philosopher of sorts, who once
considered himself to be a “Maoist”, and still likes to associate himself with what some of his
admirers call “post-Maoism”.
Badiou was strongly influenced by, and somewhat
further radicalized by, the great student uprising in France in the spring of 1968. In 1970 he
was the founder and leader of the Groupe pour la Fondation de l’Union des Communistes de
France Marxistes Léninistes, more commonly called the UCFML [Union of Communists of
France Marxist-Leninist], one of several nominally Maoist organizations in France in that period.
When the UCFML collapsed in 1985 he and his friends created L’Organisation Politique.
This small group supported immigrant rights and other reforms, but apparently did no actual
work toward social revolution. In any case, Badiou no longer believes that there needs to be,
or should be, a revolutionary political party in order to transform society!

“Up to the end of the 1970s, my friends and I defended the idea that an
emancipatory politics presumed some kind of political party. Today we are developing a
completely different idea, which we call ‘politics without party’.” —Alain Badiou,
Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. by Peter Hallward, (Verso,
2001), p. 95. (In the interview appendix.)

Even more absurdly, Badiou now explicitly renounces the class perspective in politics
and ideology, and refuses to even think in terms of the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie!

“The second thing that has changed over these last twenty years concerns
the status of class. For a long time we were faithful to the idea of a class politics, a
class state, and so on. Today we think that political initiatives which present themselves
as representations of a class have given everything they had to give.” —Alain Badiou,
ibid., p. 97.

Badiou’s philosophical views are strongly influenced by Kant,
Althusser’s corruption of Marxism and by Lacanian
psychoanalysis, along with mathematical set theory. (What a mish-mash!) Badiou is sometimes
called an adherent of the “anti-postmodern” strand of Continental Philosophy. However, for the
most part his philosophical ideas are nearly impossible to describe in any intelligeable fashion,
since they are almost completely incoherent. But whatever his philosophical views are, exactly,
it is clear that he is not a materialist. One commentator (Johannes Thumfart) argues that
Badiou’s philosophy can be regarded as a contemporary reinterpretation of Platonism.
Badiou’s views on ethics are a blend of Kant,
classless nihilism, and his usual general incoherence. [See my commentary: “Alain Badiou: A
Pseudo-Maoist Obscurantist”, at: http://www.massline.org/Philosophy/ScottH/BadiouAndEthics.pdf. —S.H.]
Oddly enough, for a person who is obviously not
a Marxist nor even a real revolutionary, Badiou and his views have recently become something of
a fad within radical movements led by intellectuals, not only in North America, but also in
desperately poor and exploited countries like India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and
South Africa! Even some revolutionary Marxists have been attracted to him, though it only serves
to discredit their own good judgment! Just how much in politics and philosophy can we possibly
have to learn from someone who rejects the class perspective, rejects the need for a revolutionary
party (and apparently also for any actual revolution), and who derives his own ideas mostly from
either bourgeois ideologists directly, or else from revisionist distorters of Marxism?!
See also: “Badiou, St. Paul, and the Mass Line”
at:
http://www.massline.info/Misc/BadiouMassLine.pdf; and
LAZARUS, Sylvain

“Bakunin joined the revolution at an early age, was imprisoned in Germany
in 1849 and extradited to the tsarist government in 1851. Shortly after, he wrote Tsar
Nicolas I a letter of ‘confession’ in which he expressed his repentance, thus betraying
the revolution. In 1857, he wrote several letters of repentance to Tsar Alexander II
pleading for mercy. In 1861, with official blessing, he effected a ‘miraculous escape’
to Western Europe. There, keeping his apostasy secret, he wormed his way into the workers’
movement and the First International to act as an informer and spy for the tsar. He
assiduously preached anarchism and opposed the theory of the dictatorship of the
proletariat.
“Marx and Engels pointed out that
Bakunin was a ‘traitor to the European proletariat’ and that he and his lieutenants
ought to receive ‘the benevolence of the governments whom they have served so well in
disorganizing the proletarian movement.’ The Great Soviet Encyclopedia which
was published by the Soviet Union in the early 1950s clearly condemns Bakunin as ‘an
ideologist of anarchism’ and ‘a deadly enemy of Marxism.’ It points out that he was guilty
of ‘betraying the fundamental interests of the revolutionary movement’ and ‘in fact
played a treacherous role with regard to the Russian revolutionaries—democrats.’
“Now, this wretch has suddenly
emerged covered with glory in the eyes of the Soviet revisionist renegades who have gone
so far as to openly challenge the judgment of Marx and Engels on him and lavish praise on
him. In Khrushchov’s time, they already set about ‘rehabilitating’ Bakunin. They acted in
a more undisguised way after Brezhnev took over. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia
(third edition), published in 1970, actually hails this shameless renegade as a
‘revolutionary.’ Whitewashing his apostasy, it asserts that his betrayal of the revolution
and grovelling before the tsar for mercy were ‘tactics designed to get himself free at
any price.’ ....
“Bakunin, a notorious expansionist in
his own right, sang the praise of the great-Russian chauvinism practised by the old tsars.
During his exile in Siberia in the late 1850s and early 1860s, he showed himself a faithful
servant of the tsar by applauding his policy of aggression against China. In a letter to
A. I. Herzen in 1860, he brazenly acclaimed tsarist Russia’s aggression against China and
lauded to the skies Nikolai Muraviev, then Lieutenant-Governor of Easter Siberia. Under his
pen, this inveterate buccaneer of great-Russian chauvinism and expansionism who seized from
China large tracts of territory south of the Outer Khingan Mountains, became ‘a fine man’
and ‘redeemer of Russia.’ He even hailed tsarist Russia’s piratic act of occupying Chinese
territory as ‘a great patriotic cause.’
“While in exile in Western Europe, he
vociferously advocated pan-Slavism in the interests of the tsar’s expansionist policy in
Europe. In a paper submitted to the tsar, he even urged him to ‘lead’ the pan-Slave
crusade ‘firmly and boldly’ so as to ‘bring good and glory to Russia.’ For this Bakunin
was sharply denounced by Marx and Engels. In their work The Alliance of Socialist
Democracy and the International Workingmen’s Association (1873), Marx and Engels wrote:
‘That is the man [meaning Bakunin] who has styled himself as an internationalist
since 1868, and in 1862 preached a racial war in the interests of the Russian Government.
Pan-Slavism is an invention of the St. Petersburg cabinet and has no other aim than to
extend the European frontiers of Russia to the west and to the south.’ They pointed out
that ‘the pan-Slavism of Nicolas to the pan-Slavism of Bakunin... pursue the one and the
same goal and all of them are in essence perfectly at one with each other.’”
—Excerpts from “Why Do the Soviet
Revisionists Try to Reverse the Verdict on Bakunin?”, Peking Review, #43, Oct. 21,
1977.

BALANCE OF PAYMENTS [International Economics]
1. An overall statement of the financial inflows and outflows for a given country during a
given period (such as over one calendar year). There are three components to such an overall
balance of payment statement:
The current
account balance includes the value of imports and exports as well as receipts from or
spending abroad in other ways, such as through tourism or workers in foreign countries sending
money back home. It also includes receipts from foreign property income.
The capital account balance includes
foreign direct investment, sales and purchases of foreign securities
(such as stocks and bonds), and sales or purchases of domestic securities by foreigners.
The third component is any change in the
foreign exchange reserves held by the government
of that country.
2. The difference between the total inflow (receipts) or outflow (expenditures) in one
of the above categories; i.e., either a net surplus or net deficit.
Changes in foreign exchange reserves are
equal to the sum of the current and capital account surpluses or deficits for that period.
Thus if there are deficits in the current account or the capital account, the foreign exchange
reserves are depleted by that same amount. If the current account and capital account added
together are in serious deficit, then the country has a “balance of payments problem”—in that
if the trend continues it will run out of foreign reserves and be unable to buy anything more
from foreign countries. A “balance of payments crisis” is a problem that has become so
severe that immediate action must to taken to change the situation, such as by obtaining an
emergency loan from the IMF or from another
government, or by devaluing its currency.

BALFOUR DECLARATION
A document of the British government issued in November 1917 that promised to support
Zionism with the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish
people” in the then Ottoman-ruled region of Arab Palestine, and to allow large numbers of Jewish
people in other countries to emigrate there. Britain expected to (and did) seize the region from
Turkey at the end of World War I. So, in effect, British imperialism vaguely promised to eventually
give away part of the land it was only then in the process of stealing for itself. At the time,
less than 10% of the population in Palestine were Jews.
So what possessed Britain to promote Zionism in
this way? Among the most important reasons were: 1) Because the British ruling class, like most or
all of the other ruling bourgeoisies in Europe, were themselves rather anti-Semitic and wanted the
Jews to go elsewhere. With regard to this first point, Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour himself “had
successfully driven the Aliens Act through Parliament with impassioned speeches regarding the need
to restrict the wave of immigration into Britain from Jews fleeing the Russian Empire”. [As noted
in the Wikipedia (accessed Feb. 9, 2019).] 2) Because the British were in this period trying
to promote greater American involvement in World War I on their side and believed that Jews in
America were influential enough to help bring this about (based on the widespread—then and
now—anti-Semitic notion that “Jewish bankers” were supposedly dominating much of the world). And
3) Because they believed that Britain could use a sympathetic and beholding population of European
Jews in the Middle East region to help it safeguard and hold onto the nearby Suez Canal. [This
point was noted decades ago in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.] In other words British support
for Zionism was done both to promote their own perceived imperialist interests and because of at
least two kinds of anti-Semitic views of their own.
In later years Britain did oppose the creation of a
Jewish state in Palestine because Britain wanted Palestine to remain as its own colony and
under its own control. But with the Balfour Declaration and the long support for large-scale Zionist
emigration to Palestine they made the eventual creation of Israel, as a racist state run by and for
Jews exclusively, virtually inevitable. They ended up supporting the theft of Palestine from the
people born and living there, first for themselves and their own imperialist interests, and
eventually by the Zionists. Thus began the long tradition of mutual interdependence and support
between the major imperialist powers (of Britain and the U.S. especially) and Zionism.

BANK FAILURES
The bankruptcy of a bank and either its dismantlement or its forced
merger with another bank. There are a few bank failures every year, even during booms, but during
severe capitalist crises there are vastly more failures. In the U.S. the recent numbers of bank
failures have been:
2007: 3
2008: 25
2009: 140
2010: 157
2011: 92
2012: 51
2013: 24
2014: 18
These figures show that the claim by bourgeois
economists that the U.S. financial crisis ended in mid-2009 was very far from the case, and a
new downturn will bring a new surge in failures. As of mid-December 2012, 417 banks have failed
since the start of the “Great Recession” at the end
of 2007. For the period 2008 through 2011, the total assets of these failed banks was $677
billion. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation fund, which is used to bail out depositors in
failed banks, still had a deficit of $11.8 billion at the end of 2011. As of mid-December 2012
there are 694 “problem banks” on the secret FDIC list, or 9.7% of all U.S. banks.
The FDIC list of all failed banks since 2000
is available at:
http://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/banklist.html
See also: GREAT DEPRESSION OF THE 1930s—1929-1933

“‘Barefoot doctors’ is the affectionate name Shanghai’s suburban poor and
lower-middle peasants have given to health workers who divide their time between farming
and medical work. [Note: Shanghai municipality itself included some large rural and
semi-rural areas at this time. —Ed.]
“In 1958 in response to Chairman Mao’s
great call, medical circles in Shanghai organized a 10,000 strong contingent to go to the
rural areas, where they trained, in short-term classes and through practice, large numbers
of health workers who did not divorce themselves from production. Giving medical treatment
and vigorously carrying out preventive measures and doing propaganda work, they achieved
outstanding successes in transforming public health and medical conditions in the rural
areas. In 1965, Chairman Mao issued his brilliant instruction: ‘In medical and health
work, put the stress on the rural areas.’ The counties on the outskirts of Shanghai
carried out a comprehensive job of reorganizing and training ‘barefoot doctors’ who both
farm and give medical service to bring the number up to more than 4,500. These ‘barefoot
doctors’ in turn trained more than 29,000 health workers for the production teams.”
—Introductory note to two articles about ‘barefoot doctors’ in the magazine Chinese
Literature, 1968, #12, online at:
http://www.bannedthought.net/China/Magazines/ChineseLiterature/1968/CL1968-12.pdf

“Many people say, yes, you’ve got all these para-medical workers, but
what kind of level have they got? What kind of doctors are they really? Do they really
look after the health of the people? This raises very big questions, including the
question of what attributes a doctor should have.
“Some people think that the most
important attributes are to have a lot of degrees, to have gone through a lot of specialist
courses, to have a good bed-side manner, and so on. I’m not belittling the importance of
professional skill, and mastery of modern techniques. But in my opinion, the most important
attribute that any doctor can possibly have is the determination to put the interests of
his patients before everything else, to devote his whole life to the service of his
patients, of his fellow men. If he has this drive, if he has this motivation, he’s a good
doctor. And if he doesn’t have it he falls short of being a good doctor no matter what his
technical or professional level is.
“Peasant doctors have this
determination to be of service to their fellow men. To whatever degree their technical or
professional knowledge falls short of the ideal, that can be put right in time. And will
be put right in time. Because to have a sense of responsibility towards your patients means
that you also have the determination to equip yourself with the knowledge and skills to
serve their needs. It’s part of the same thing.
“So I say to those good people who
say, ah well, what kind of doctors are they? they don’t really count—I say they do
count. I say this is the kind of doctor of the future—this is not an expedient, this is
not just a stop-gap measure. This is how doctors of the future will be trained, rooted
among the people. They will come from the people, they will be motivated by a desire to
serve the people, they will not be separated from the people, by their income, their dress,
their motor cars, where they live, or anything else. They’ll merge with the people and
serve them to the best of their ability.” —Dr. Joshua Horn, “The Mass Line”, a wonderful
1971 speech available in full at:
http://www.massline.info/China/JHorn-ML.htm

“BARRACKS SOCIALISM”
Sometimes the most horrendous situations or circumstances have been called
“socialist” or “communist” by
those who don’t know any better. During the 20th century it is extremely doubtful if a great
many of the regimes which have called themselves “socialist”, such as most of those in Eastern
Europe after 1945, were properly so called. The same could be said of many of the regimes in
Africa from the 1950s on, which were trying to escape imperialist control but often degenerated
into personal or military dictatorships of the local elites. However, it is likely that the
worst perversion of the name socialism has come with the regime in North Korea (the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea) of which it should surely be said that this was not genuine socialism
by any stretch of the imagination, but rather an extremely perverted distortion of the idea, of
the sort that characterizes military barracks and prisons.

“Herr [Karl] Grün says: ‘Listen to Mirabeau!’ and quotes some of the passages
stressed by Cabet, in which Mirabeau advocates the equal division of bequeathed property
among brothers and sisters. Herr Grün exclaims: ‘Communism for the family!’. On this
principle, Herr Grün could go through the whole range of bourgeois institutions, finding
in all of them traces of communism, so that taken as a whole they could be said to
represent perfect communism. He could christen the Code Napoléon a Code de la communauté!
And he could discover communist colonies in the brothels, barracks and prisons.” —Marx &
Engels, The German Ideology (1845-6), Vol. II, Ch. 4, section IV, online at:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch04d.htm

BARTER
The exchange of commodities for each other without using the medium of money.
For example, someone might trade a TV set for a piece of furniture. Or on the international
level, one country might trade a number of tons of iron ore for a certain large number of
bushels of wheat.
—Barter began in prehistoric times, before
money even existed yet. The origin of money, in fact, lies in the tendency to compare the
value of different bartered goods to a standard commodity (such as gold) which is relatively
rare, indestructable, portable, and so forth. In the modern world, large-scale barter between
nations is often an indication that no stable or otherwise acceptable common currency is
available to smooth the transaction. Within a country, barter is sometimes used between
individuals or companies to hide income and thus avoid paying taxes on that income.

BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE
Concepts of historical materialism: The base
(or “basis”, or “economic base”) is the totality of the underlying relations of production in
a given society, or in other words, the underlying economic structure; the superstructure
is the totality of all the social phenomena which ultimately arise from this base and depend
upon it, but nevertheless also tend to influence the base in its turn. The superstructure
therefore includes social consciousness (including
all forms of ideology), human social relationships other than
those which constitute the relations of production, and institutions and organizations that
make up society, such as the State, political parties, law courts,
churches, etc.

“The general guiding principle of my studies can be summarized as follows:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations,
which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given
stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these
relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation,
on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms
of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general
process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that
determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into
conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing
in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have
operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn
into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic
foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”
—Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Preface, (January 1859),
MECW 29:263.

BASTARD KEYNESIANISM
A term coined by Joan Robinson to refer to various other
bourgeois economists (especially Americans such as Paul Samuelson)
who adopted aspects of the Keynesian perspective but crudely distorted
it in the direction of standard neoclassical bourgeois
economics, especially by covertly restoring the supposed validity of “Say’s
Law”. The “bastards” distorted Keynes by arguing that, given a certain level of savings, the
government could ensure enough investment, which Robinson found little different than the
neoclassical claim that savings determines investment, and which ignored the effect of insufficient
market demand (underconsumption) upon investment. Robinson complained that Keynes’ concept of
“effective demand” had been abandoned and also that there was little concern for understanding
what capital actually was.

“Say’s Law implied that there could not be a deficiency of demand; the
bastard Keynesian doctrine takes the rate of saving as knowable and then through fiscal
and monetary policy arranges an equal amount of investment, thus restoring Say’s Law.
[Robinson says:] ‘Under its shelter all the old doctrines creep back again, even the
doctrine that any given stock of capital will provide employment for any amount of labor
at the appropriate equilibrium level.’” —Marjorie Shepherd Turner, Joan Robinson and
the Americans (M.E. Sharpe, 1989, p. 111.)

BAY OF PIGS INVASION
The invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs location in April 1961 which was organized and directed
by the American CIA in an attempt to overthrow the Castro regime and put
in power a puppet government controlled by U.S. imperialism. The goal from the beginning was to
hide U.S. involvement in the invasion and maintain the pretense that the invasion was the work of
anti-Castro exiles from Cuba, and this ultimately led to its failure. The CIA organized, trained
and supplied the 1,400 member invasion force (which did however include a small number of U.S.
military personnel as well as many CIA officers). This imperialist invasion and overthrow effort
turned into a complete fiasco for the United States and was easily defeated by the Cuban military
in just three days.
Many people are not aware of the back scenes
struggle between the CIA and the Kennedy administration which led to this fiasco. The CIA, and
its director Allen Dulles, were well aware by the time they
assured President Kennedy that the plan would work that it could not actually work unless
the U.S. military also supported the invasion. Kennedy had made it clear that he was unwilling to
do this because he was pushing a new line for American imperialism and trying to make it appear
less threatening to the rest of the world. But the CIA figured that in the end Kennedy would have
no other choice and therefore tried to trick him into a course of action he was trying to avoid.
It didn’t work. Not because Kennedy was opposed to imperialism, but because he was trying to do
a better job of hiding the nature of U.S. imperialism from the world.

“Perhaps the most devasating revelation about the CIA operation emerged
years later, in 2005, when the agency was compelled to release the minutes of a meeting
held by its Cuba task force on November 15, 1960, one week after Kennedy’s election. The
group, which was deliberating on how to brief the president-elect on the pending invasion,
came to an eye-opening conclusion. In the face of strong security measures that Castro
had implemented, the CIA task force admitted, their invasion plan was ‘now seen to be
unachievable, except as a joint [CIA/Department of Defense] action.’ In other words, the
CIA realized that its Bay of Pigs expedition was doomed to fail unless its exile brigade
was reinforced by the power of the U.S. military. But the CIA never shared this sobering
assessment with the president.”
—David Talbot, Devil’s Chessboard:
Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (2015), p. 398.
[Talbot, a liberal bourgeois writer and fan of President Kennedy, argues extensively in
this book that the CIA went ahead with this plan which—on the face of it—was doomed, because
they believed that when it began to fail it would force President Kennedy to turn to
a massive U.S. military invasion of Cuba with Marines and U.S. Air Force bombings, to bail
out the feeble and inept CIA-organized invasion of Cuban exiles and soldiers of fortune.
However, Kennedy was attempting to put a pretty face on American imperialism and hide
any direct involvement of the U.S. in schemes to overthrow other governments. For this
reason he refused to be manipulated by Allen Dulles and the CIA into using the U.S.
military in Cuba, and was even willing to let the whole Bay of Pigs invasion—which he
had authorized—collapse instead. However, following that embarassing fiasco, a major
focus and even obsession of Kennedy and his administration was to try to arrange for the
assassination of Fidel Castro. —Ed.]

“Years after the Bay of Pigs, historians—including the CIA’s own Jack
Pfeiffer—painted a portrait of Dulles as a spymaster in decline, bumbling and disengaged
and maybe too advanced in years, at age sixty-eight, for the rigors of his job. Only a spy
chief with a shaky grasp on the tiller could have overlooked the deep flaws embedded in
the Bay of Pigs strategy, it was stated.
“But, as usual, there was method to
Dulles’s seeming carelessness. It is now clear that the CIA’s Bay of Pigs expedition was
not simply doomed to fail, it was meant to fail. And its failure was designed to
trigger the real action—an all-out, U.S. military invasion of the island. Dulles plunged
ahead with his hopeless, paramilitary mission—an expedition that he had staffed with
‘C-minus’ officers and expendable Cuban ‘puppets’—because he was serenely confident that,
in the heat of battle, Kennedy would be forced to send the Marines crashing ashore. Dulles
was banking on the young, untested commander in chief to cave in to pressure from the
Washington war machine, just as other presidents had bent to the spymaster’s will.”
—David Talbot, ibid., pp. 399-400.
[Liberals, like Talbot, want to blame wars and most other major crimes of the United States
on just the CIA and the Pentagon, and imagine that their heroes, such as John Kennedy and
Barack Obama are actually trying to stop such outrages. The reality is quite different. It
is just a matter of different imperialist strategies, and both Kennedy and Obama proved
only too well that they were also willing and able to use the U.S. war machine when they
saw the need to do so. Kennedy, for crying out loud, came close to ending human
civilization in his game of nuclear chicken with Khrushchev in the Cuban Missile Crisis
just 16 months later! But it is true that even intra-ruling class struggles over
imperialist strategy can be quite ferocious at times. —Ed.]